Part one: Harold gets a raise.

It was a cloudy Tuesday in November. It was cold. It was bleak. So bleak that the sky couldn't even muster the strength to rain. It just misted and drizzled, tiny droplets of water wafting on the breeze while heavier ones collided silently with t he pavement. Cars swished down the street.

Not even worth the effort, thought Harold, as he walked towards his building. He paused and looked up into the moist haze, wished for rain. The grey concrete office block looked unusually sad.

"Respect for tradition..." he muttered in a mock militant tone before trailing off. It didn't feel like a birthday. He wasn't morose enough. He chuckled at the thought. Thirteen rainy birthdays in a row, if you could call this rain. For the reco rd book, he thought, he would. Thirteen rainy birthdays. Thirteen. He briefly wondered if something bad would happen on this one, but his superstition wasn't strong enough to conjure up a painful or embarrassing image. So he let the thought go. He was capable of better ones.

The thought of a raise helped push him toward his job. That and the intensifying rain. It began to make a feeble sizzling sound on the shiny sidewalk. There, he thought. Real, honest to God, rain.

Everybody else seemed to be carrying umbrellas...

When the elevator doors opened on his floor, Harold Faust knew his day would be long. It was hot. Stifling. The air handlers were apparently malfunctioning again. He though the word "Shit" as loud as he could as he pulled his overcoat off and wal ked down a sterile corridor. While he punched his access code into the keypad above the doorknob, he looked through the vertical window into his office, knowing it would be even hotter and stuffier in there, due to some brilliantly misguided air-duct t echnology that nobody could satisfactorily explain. At least he would dry off quickly. And then start sweating. Especially when it came time to have his meeting with The Director.

Susan wanted to see him at 2:45, an hour and forty-five minutes away. A lot of work he was sure to get done between now and then. He had to think fast. Or at least he felt like he should, since he still hadn't decided what to say when he was offer ed the position upgrade. Should he accept it, even though it was less than he had hoped for? Or should he refuse it, respectfully (and boy would that be hard to pull off), explaining that he thought he was doing the work of an even higher grade than Su san was going to offer him? It was a hard choice. After all, he hadn't brought that up when she told him she was pushing to get him a two-grade pay-boost. He was so surprised that she had finally responded to his requests to have his job description ex amined that he was unprepared to bicker over the details. Two or three thousand dollars a year worth of details. The easy thing would be to accept it and smile. A raise was a raise.

But if he went through the trouble to pester the boss for 4 months to raise his salary, should he really settle for less than he was worth? There was no way they would give him another raise anytime soon. And the worst that could happen would be th at Susan would stand back, smiling, crossing her arms, looking him straight in the eye and say something like "Well, this is the job proposal I have, I don't know that I could justify another upgrade right after working this one out with Stephen and Marci a ", and he would be standing there, trying to figure out a quick, concise, articulate comeback that would reanimate his deceased protest, which would actually be pretty bad, and painful, and embarrassing. Harold wasn't cut out for Corporate Life.

A raise was a raise.

Thirteen rainy birthdays and counting...

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Part two: Heading Home.

Traffic was congested, due to an unexpected thunderstorm; unusual for late November. Strangers, packed shoulder to shoulder, steamed up the windows, breathed all the available air. Harold could feel beads of sweat roll down his back and gather at his belt. The bus was almost as hot as his office, and just as slow. He wished he could wriggle out of his overcoat without disturbing the man on his left or falling into the crowded aisle. He looked at the rubberized floor, at the shoes that seemed to cover most of it. At the humid figures growing out from those shoes like warm fungi, waving and jolting with the bus's brakes. Somebody else's overcoat dangled loosely over an arm and into Harold's peripheral vision, brushing his shoulder. It tickl ed his personal space like bronchitis. His mind kept swatting at it, getting stuck in the morass of flesh on the bus. Bodies everywhere - beside him, above him, in front and behind. A cattle wagon. Off to the slaughterhouse. The ride home.

"Excuse me." A husky voice announced the shoulder to his left as it started to push into him. The guy with the window seat wanted to get off.

Harold gladly obliged, by pushing himself up into the sardine can aisle and backing away. The man stepped on both of his feet before lurching toward the back door of the bus. Parcels, bags, and a wet traveler slid up against him as he took the wind ow seat. He tried to ignore it by turning his attention outside. The window was cool to the touch. He wiped away a patch of fog with his cuff. Absolutely pissing out there. His new raise would barely even pay to fix the car.

"Could you hold this for a minute?"

Harold didn't want to look back into the bus.

"Pardon me, but could you hold this for a minute, I need to find a tissue", an overweight, aged wet man stuck a grocery bag into his lap.

Harold cradled it without comment, wondering what could be so heavy but take up so little space in the bag. The thing in the bag rolled sideways. He glanced at the man, who looked like he would look like he was a hundred, were it not for his corpule nce-filled wrinkles. Mucous oozed from his eyes and nose. Probably from other places as well. The man was laboring with the pockets of his threadbare and drab clothing to find the tissue, jabbing Harold in the ribs, hips, and sharply on the cheek.

"Here", Harold said, pulling his handkerchief from his coat pocket and proffering it.

The old man grabbed it thanklessly and began wiping at his mucous. His right hand was missing. A well-rounded stump served as an appendage. Probably a war wound. Harold told himself not to stare.

The man pocketed Harold's handkerchief and went back to searching himself. Grunting, he apparently found what he was looking for, but didn't take it out. He smiled and pulled his hand out of his pocket, his stump out of another. He then patted the first pocket and grunted again.

Harold waited for the man to take the bag back. Instead, he started going through his pockets once more, this time with a grin, mumbling something about losing his head. Was this some kind of practical joke?

Harold went back to window and the world outside. Pissing, but wide open. All the cars looked new in the wet gleam of the traffic lights. Rain flowed across the roadway into the gutters. Thunder rolled through the streets, unimpeded by the heavy traffic. The thing in the bag in Harold's lap shifted and caused the bag to drop to the floor with a painful thud.

"Whoops, sorry-," Harold started, lunging after the bag, but realized the old man was no longer next to him. Nobody was.

Harold looked around, picked up the bag, stood up to do something, and fell back into his seat as the bus lurched forward. He replaced the bag in his lap to make room for the next person to sit down.

What to do with the bag? Give it to the driver? Get off the bus and walk back a few blocks to catch up to the man? Whatever was in the bag was surely important. Maybe he should take it to the police station. Maybe it was medicine or something. Maybe he should look inside.

As he began to unravel the crunched-up bag top, he uncovered some writing, neatly printed capital letters in black magic marker. It was an address: Harold had to read it twice before he believed what he was reading. H.F., 411 N. 40th STREET APT . 11A. That was Harold. His address. His initials. Whatever was inside was meant for him.

He pulled the cord.

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Part three: The Birthday Present.

The city ground away at itself, creaking, crunching, coughing, and screaming. Rain washed debris into the streets, carried soda cans toward overflowing drains. People scurried. Cars splashed and screeched. Lightning flashed into alleys, snapping portraits that instantly burned away. Unnoticed hurried a confused and drenched figure cradling a soggy paper bag in both hands. Harold could barely feel the icy, drenching downpour. Whatever was in the bag, it was starting to push through the bottom. An inexplicable panic came over him -- he started walking faster, knocking into people as he blindly passed them on the sidewalk.

The front door to Apt. 11A burst open just as thunder barreled through the hallways and a crisp flash of lightning shot through the windows. The door bounced off the wall and crashed back into him. He turned on a light with his elbow and rushed toward the kitchen table with the dilapidated bag, the contents of which were breaking through the bottom. As he swung the bag up to the table the bottom fell out.

A human hand clutching a magic marker tore through the bag and crashed solidly into the floor. It rolled unevenly into a cabinet. No blood.

The hum of the refrigerator. The beating of his heart. Lightning. Thunder. Rain pelting the window. Each successive sound blurred into a muddy audiotape played with low batteries. Tunnel vision blurred everything but the morbid birthday present. White noise rose and engulfed him.

"Happy Birthday, Harold!" cried someone at his open door.

Think fast.

He twisted around and ran, slipping into a skid, stopping just before crashing into Mrs. Mortimer. He pulled the door closed enough so that his body obscured what was inside the apartment.

"Thank you, Mrs. Mortimer", he half shouted, catching his breath.

She craned to see what he was hiding. He pulled the door closer to his body.

"Is something wrong, Harold? You look upset," her tone was genuinely concerned, but had a practiced air of etiquette.

"No, no, I'm, uh, just got home, kinda tired, you know how it is..." Harold wanted nothing more than to close the door. But Mrs. Mortimer was the Matron of the apartment block. She had taken him under her wing, or so she seemed to like to think. His participation in this ritual guaranteed him a turkey dinner every thanksgiving and a ham dinner every Easter.

"Don't let the rain get you down, Harold. As I always told my kids if it rained on their birthday, remember: The rain doesn't know its your birthday. Just think of the fine weather you've had on other ones."

"Thanks, Mrs. Mortimer, that's reassuring," he replied, wondering how poorly he was masking his irony.

She finally, reluctantly, turned toward her door. Her face searched his for clues.

He bolted the door, looked through the peephole. Mrs. Mortimer was fumbling for her keys, shaking her head. He didn't want to turn around. To confirm what was surely on his kitchen floor. He slowly rotated and put his back to the door, hands tre mbling, stomach knotted.

"Happy Birthday Harold!" repeated in his head.

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